Friday, June 01, 2012

Over the past few years, it's been more difficult to get a government issued driver's license without having many different forms of identification in order to prove you are who you say you are. For most people, this is an annoyance and they can't understand why it's being done.

Over the past couple years in baseball, there has been players, many from countries outside of the U.S., that come here to play baseball and used assumed names. When I say assumed, I as actually stretching to say, fake names. For whatever reason, several ballplayers, one of which was on the Miami Marlins, have had different names that they used for one reason or another.

One Marlins player who has had name trouble was formally going by the name of Leo Nunez. When it was uncovered that this pitcher was playing under a fake name, he was using in September of last year. His real name is Juan Oviedo.

Oviedo hasn't completely got that situation worked out yet from the Dominican Republic, where he is from, but that hasn't stopped the Marlins from offering him a $6M contract for a season of baseball next year if he can get all of this name game business behind him.

Even the Miami Marlins slugger Mike Stanton is not called Mike Stanton anymore. This wasn't a situation of using a false name, but it was Stanton's decision to use a different combination of his real birth name which is Giancarlo Cruz Michael Stanton. How did he get this many names? I am not too sure, but from now on he'll be Giancarlo Stanton, unless of course next year he wants to change that to some other combination of his names.

Anyway, the Marlins are in town tonight, and even their name has changed from last year. Yes, it's the Miami Marlins now.